Mac Crane: It is the first match of the rest of their lives: Green and Six vs Mack and Liv. What sport are they playing? It doesn’t matter. Could be basketball, could be beach volleyball, could be table tennis. Maybe they’ve succumbed to the popularity of pickleball. Who knows! What matters is they are hot, sweaty, and ready for some action.

Okay, but for real, if you are here, if you are reading this conversation, buckle in. I got the chance to talk with Benedict Nguyễn, author of the best-named novel of the year, Hot Girls with Balls, about so much good stuff: the body and movement, communication and sports, parasocial relationships, queer desire, performance and surveillance capitalism, the art of the meet cute, and beyond. I am incredibly grateful to live in the time of this brilliant, hilarious, and deeply felt book. And you should be, too.

Benedict Nguyễn: Queer sports ball summer!! The orb is the medium and the materials being transmitted include desire, grief, buzzy kinetics, strength, rage, and more. Mack and Liv are on the brink of the next chapter of athletic greatness and their also two teenagers trying to grow up with imperfect social support systems around them. A Sharp Endless Need is such a beautiful coming-of-age novel reckoning with some messy and painful questions amidst so much beauty and potential. Mac Crane and I have both been edited by the brilliant Alicia Kroell at Catapult and it’s so cool to get to chat about overlaps and divergences in our two books.

MC: Hey Benedict, I’m so so happy to get the chance to chat with you! I know that you are a dancer and gym buff. I read some of your writing about dance and movement, and found so many parallels between what you say about dance and sports as I’ve experienced them. In an artist profile, you said, “Sometimes there are no words that will help my body understand what I want it to do. Dance can be a language but it’s also something else entirely.” I’d love to talk more about this as it relates to your novel and volleyball. Do you feel similarly about the movement in volleyball, for yourself, and/or for the main characters, Six and Green?

BN: Mac, okay gosh, I don’t remember writing that haha but still true!

In volleyball, players are constantly talking to each other but at some point in my novel, one of my protagonists, Six, notices that her cis boy teammates aren’t actually communicating with each other. They may shout out cues but their bodies aren’t as in sync or even aware of each other as they could be. Can Six intervene?! Words aren’t enough, and sports ball isn’t just about communication, but whew, the things a sports ball can help people communicate!

MC: I remember that part of your book well and really loved it, I think because it’s something I used to think about often on the court. It’s often the thing that separates good teams from great teams—there is that it factor, that chemistry, that knowing each other intimately that allows a team to move as one.

BN: In A Sharp Endless Need, protagonist Mack experiences basketball as a medium for a more expansive embodiment, for their unrealized desires. Well, yes! In one scene, they note that another fails to see any romance in their own game. How is that possible?? How did you think about those differing relationships to the sport in your book?

MC: Ah, the romance of the game. Mack and I are similar in that it never occurred to either of us that people could have a casual relationship with the game, that someone could simply like it and that be enough for them. That they don’t need anything more from the game than, I don’t know, fun or entertainment or something to do after school. It rocks Mack’s world when they learn that it’s not romance, not life or death, for everyone. Because Mack feels this way about basketball, it’s easy to understand how they form their entire identity around the sport, around being able to access it, doing it really well, etc. It’s a scary thing to forget about the rest of yourself.

BN: Yes, I am the same! In dance, learning about my own biomechanics has always and will always be fascinating to me. But cross training and better functional movement are always in service of a greater capacity for romance, i.e. artistic expression.

With Six and Green, their talents combined with early exposure to volleyball have made the sport inseparable from their senses of self. In the timeline of the novel though, Green is particularly conscious of how vball comprises nearly her entire economic self and contends with having spent her entire career only having done one very specific thing.

MC: Oh my god, I love that: “in service of a greater capacity for romance.”

I really felt for Green throughout the book. That struggle plus the jealousy and competitiveness she felt related to her girlfriend, Six. It’s so regrettably human. One thing I was so taken with about your book is the examination of what it means to love someone in public, to love on a stage, and how the public nature can corrupt that very love. Green and Six are always performing, even in the context of their relationship, thanks to their influencer statuses.

How were you thinking about the private vs the public when writing this book, these characters?

BN: That tension is definitely one of the thematic sports matches driving the book. The opening scene is a super meta conversation between Six and Green negotiating the public narrative they’re offering their fans about themselves and their relationship. While our hot girls are thinking about this at a certain scale, I think that heightened drama actually speaks to the logic that shapes how even people with ‘smaller audiences’ feel outsized scrutiny in what we present or not. In surveillance capitalism, the weight of a single post has been artificially taken out of proportion. With Six and Green, that disjuncture is strong enough to destabilize the relationship they’ve been building for nearly a decade.

MC: God, that’s so true, the weight of a single post. You know, I watch all these influencer queer couples on TikTok make videos together and I always wonder how the act of content creation and filming damn near every moment of their lives affects them. Presumably, it erodes any semblance of a connection or strong bond because they are all forever breaking up.

BN: Mack describes themself as “a stud athlete with a hungry, hungry penchant for escape.” What are they escaping from?

MC: If you’d ask them, they’d probably be like, fuck, what aren’t I escaping from? But it’s a combination of the claustrophobia of small-town conservative life and all the homophobia and transphobia that comes with it as well as the pressures of being a competitive athlete. There are the external pressures and expectations from the community, coaches, the mom, etc. but also the intense, constant internal pressure Mack puts on themself to be great, to succeed, to, in their eyes, be worthy of love, since they equate the two.

BN: When you’re a teenager, it’s not just that the stakes feel too high. They really are that high because a teenager can’t access the full autonomy of adulthood and yet, are faced with very consequential decisions that will shape the rest of their lives. Of course, everyone experiences trauma of some shape but it’s a delicate balance between acknowledging that humanity and reducing a person to their pain. How did you think about developing your protagonist in relation to or against the notion of a ‘trauma plot?’

MC: That’s such a great question on trauma plot. It’s unfortunate, I think, that the trauma plot trope is so prevalent in queer fiction. There’s a difference, to me, between portraying trauma realistically (without being egregious) and using trauma as a replacement for true character depth and development, for replacing storytelling with trauma dumping. When writing this book, I wanted to write into my own coming of age experiences as a closeted queer and trans basketball player in PA. It may sound corny as fuck, but I wanted to gift my teen self this book. And while there is trauma in the book, I wanted it to be clear that Mack exists as a fully realized person outside of that trauma. They aren’t explained away by what has happened to them.

Pivoting here, but I loveeeee how the social comments/chat functions as its own character in your book. Can you talk about the creation of that, how you were thinking about audience and parasocial dynamics?

BN: For Six and Green, they can try to shape narratives about their individual lives and their power coupledom but ultimately, the democratization of social platforms has allowed strangers sizable influence in shaping their public image. While the book mostly takes place in a close 3rd to our main characters, their own perception of the world is complicated by observations and… let’s call it some amateur reporting on their latest moves.

MC: Ha! Amateur reporting, I love that, ahem, generous reframe.

BN: Do you have any spicy takes on the proliferation of our contemporary sports discourse machines?

MC: Oh gosh, spicy takes. I don’t know about that but I do feel sort of weird about what I think of as fan fiction of the WNBA. Like, fans on TikTok will make edits of players to make it look like they had a sexy moment or are into each other, even if they aren’t (publicly) queer, and the jock part of me is like, “can we please focus on their talent?” But the gay part of me is like “but what if?”

BN: Right? Like, ~don’t sexualize the athletes~ and/but/also, the way video editing can artificially create compelling ‘now kiss’ energy in the most banal interaction. Yikes!

Mack expresses derision regarding forums, but how do they affect the world of high school athletics and NCAA recruitment in their 2000s iterations?

MC: Before the likes of TikTok and Twitter, Mack, while reading a sports forum, experiences something close to how it feels for me to read my own G**dreads reviews—the disorientation of a stranger publicly discussing your performance + talent in a particularly critical and even cruel way because of the anonymity the forum offers. It’s a lot to process at any age, let alone as an adolescent. And sure, they could just not look at the forum, but what sort of fun is that? What sort of masochist would they be?

I’m not sure about NCAA recruiting, but I think these forums fueled rivalries (between both teams and star players), platformed jealousy and resentment, and normalized deriding literal children.

I was wondering if you could tell me more about your approach to satire. Your book is so funny and irreverent while still managing to take its characters and their lives seriously. The result is deeply affecting and insightful, the type of social commentary that lingers with the reader.

BN: I wanted to compose a sludge of unserious ****posting as serious literary text. I hoped that the blurring of earnest remarks with deliberate haha-punchlines, as well as the whiplash between Six and Green trying to live their lives and the doom scroll sections, might offer their own critique of the sports match of living, living online, and observing each other across mediums. In scenes with Six and Green, we can see how their respective disdain and obsession with their public images distorts their perception of each other and it’s both archly funny and genuinely gut-wrenching (for me at least!)

MC: Yes, you succeeded x a million!!!!

BN: Okay, I have to ask about the art of the meet cute. How did you think about structuring Mack and Liv’s first encounter/spontaneous date? How do their initial energies shape the rest of the story?

MC: I didn’t want their meeting to be only cute or magical or enchanting or what have you. I needed it to live in this complicated emotional and psychological space. Mack is grieving the sudden death of their dad, and they’re also attending their dad’s bizarre death day party that he had outlined in his will, which gives that chapter a sort of surreal feel to it. And here comes this hot basketball player, Liv, who can give Mack a run for their money. They’re incredibly excited about Liv, which makes them feel guilty because they’re supposed to be grieving, because this isn’t a time to be grateful for some erotic collision. Grief and guilt so often go hand in hand—you have survivor’s guilt, moving-on guilt, forgetting-the-person guilt, the guilt of not grieving the “right” way, and so on. That grief informs every interaction between Mack and Liv for the rest of their time together, whether they know it or not.

BN: That scene definitely had so many complicated layers. I felt the flicker of new romance pulsing through Mack’s grief, as well as the resulting confusion and uncertainty as they got in Liv’s car. Such a beautifully written scene!!

MC: Last question! What is the sexiest sports experience you’ve ever had? You can interpret that however you’d like.

BN: LOL! So I can’t give the true superlative answer to that question here. But top 10 definitely includes going for a stroll with someone and having our steps sync up and our breathing calibrate together... That’s very hot :)

MC: Hahahaha fair enough. Love that answer—hell yeah it is.